Hi List. I heard (but haven't actually seen) that in MS-Windows the system keeps track of some notion of "working set", which is supposedly (if I understand correctly) the total size of pages that an application referenced recently - whether these are currently resident or swapped out (see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms684891.aspx which is an MSDN article I found on the subject).
The way I understand processes normally work (in Linux anyway) is that as long as there is enough memory available the memory manager keeps all pages that an application constantly references in physical RAM, and pages that are not references are swapped out after a while. A good example of such is a long running Java virtual machine process (at least the Sun implementation anyway) that doesn't return unused memory to the operating system letting it being swapped out until its needed again - so I have some jvm process which takes up some 1.5GB of virtual but less then 150MB resident: it was processing a lot of data some time in the past but now its idling. Now (again - according to my understanding) under contention - i.e. when processes need to use more physical memory then what is available - the memory manager keeps swapping stuff in and out of memory in an attempt to satisfy all requests. Under such conditions its might be useful to know - for each process - the amount of physical memory in use, the amount of virtual mapped to the process, but also how much of that virtual memory the process actually tries to use but can't get it all in physical RAM because other processes are also hogging the memory. Does such a thing exist in Linux? Thanks in advance -- Oded ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
